Nostalgia: Remember those old-style cane chairs?

This was the first picture I colored in for the Dancing Streets book (see previous post here). I jumped at it only because I wanted to see whether I could render the brown of the cane, and the way the light played on the outer edges vs the parts of the chair in shadow.

This was also an exercise in coloring in the pre-war Peranakan row houses in the background. Typically in pastel colors, these buildings on Keong Saik Street in Chinatown have undergone gentrification lately; what were once headquarters for Chinese clan associations are now quite likely to be Western pubs and restaurants, PR consultancies or other businesses.

But many F&B businesses along this street, famous for its past as a red-light district, trade on the history of old Singapore, hence nostalgic touches such as the use of these cane chairs in their decor.

Coloring is far from being a "mindless" activity. One really looks at the picture -  and in this case, spots some drawing missteps, such as the missing building details through the ribs of the cane chair. It's white space there, where one should be able to see parts of the building in the background. And the chairs in the background also lack detail, which is why I colored them in progressively lighter shades of brown so they would "fade" into the distance.

Maybe the artist deliberately left out what he thought were unessential details.

Oh, and I came across someone else's rendering of the same picture. See below. I think the light on the cane was done better than mine. The white highlights are clearer, indicating a higher shine than in my picture.

And there are long shadows of the legs of the chair and tables too. Darn. We live and learn, don't we?

Minor quibble: if the light was falling on the back of this cane chair,
shouldn't the shadows on the floor have gone in the opposite direction - from
bottom left to top right, instead of from bottom right to top left?

Coloring in pictures of Singapore

 

After coloring in pictures drawn by Westerners - foxes and cute woodland creatures in "enchanted" forests - it is a good change to work on pictures of home.

I came upon Dancing Streets (below), a coloring book by Gine Yeo, a Singapore architect, and bought it instantly. To do the drawings for this book, he had gone on several walking tours through the older and newer parts of Singapore - Chinatown, Capitol Piazza -  and in a twist, rendered them as though they were being looked at through fish-eye lens. The buildings stray from the ram-rod straight and curve crazily, hence the book title.

Yeah, it was a "Buy 1, Get 1 Free" deal. The other book I
got for free was also another with local (Asian) content.
But I'll cover that in another post.

The Chinese temple picture was the second picture I attempted in the book. I had felt challenged to render the door in a blazing red, after seeing pictures of Chinese temples with such bold doors. The decorative "cup" features on the door, in shiny metal, were also an invitation to try for a textural finish.

The door was the first thing I attempted in this picture, and the rest of the picture was mostly finished in an afterthought! The door took six shades of red, done mostly in trial and error. By the time the finishing touches were put to it, the surface of the paper was already very slick with wax. I had used three layers of Prismacolor's carmine at the base, just to build up the color. I then put a coat of permanent red for a richer hue, and used a combo of Tuscan red and crimson lake (both dark reds) for the shadows at the top and far edge of the door. Poppy red gave a brighter hue to the lighter areas.

The metal cups on the doors... I used bronze, gold and white, and a 90% warm grey for the shadows.

A piece done with Derwent color pencils

 

I completed this today using only my Derwent Coloursoft 72s instead of my Prismacolor set, just to take note of the differences, if any.

Prismacolor is the superior brand, I say. When you layer one colour atop another, the wax pigments just meld together so much better than with Derwent. If I look closely at this lion from the Johanna Basford book, I see two colors remaining stubbornly separate, even after using a blender pencil.

I have no complaints about the richness of the pigments for either brand.

Basford, a bit too fiddly?

I can't say I enjoyed doing either of these from Johanna Basford's Enchanted Garden book. There are so many elements in them, and each is tiny, limiting the scope for shading. But at least I completed them.

Are there Basford fans out there who would defend her style of drawing?

'Right colors', 'wrong colors'?

What I am about to say may be subjective, but I really do feel that there are 'right' colors that go together.

This one on the seahorses from my Harmony of Colour book, for instance. Each one presented opportunities to use colors together, and my choices were not random. I picked green as the predominant color for the main seahorse, and introduced a complementary color - red (opposite to green on the color wheel) and then moved a little down the color wheel to orange, and moved up a bit to allow in a blue.

The other seahorse had a palette of purples and pinks, mainly, and the incomplete seahorse to the top right-hand corner was to have been in a palette of cool blues, blue-greens and greens. The seahorse to the bottom left-hand corner was mostly earth-toned.

I also made this an exercise in light, imagining the light source coming from the right, so the shades were light and dark accordingly.

The elephant above  (from the same book) must count as one of my most disappointing pieces so far. It just looks wrong. Blue, yellow and reds with pinks and browns? It just doesn't 'go'. Another abandoned work. (Abandoned also because the drawing was too fiddly and demanding. The fine lines also presented a challenge.)

Does anyone out there agree with me on 'right' and 'wrong' colours?

Coloring in backgrounds

If you want your main subject to pop out, consider a palette of paler colors for the background. Or even a contrasting palette of colors.

This was my takeaway from doing this eagle and the following bird, both from my Harmony of Colour book:

I used browns (again!) for the eagle, which was fine,
but I should have muted the colors of the background. I
realised this too late, and didn't even bother finishing
the work on the background. Consider this
an abandoned piece...

This one worked better, with the (mythical?) bird in
strong teal and the background in pastels. This too, was an
abandoned work. I ran out of patience to color in
 the fiddly background!

My 'spirit animal', the owl

There was once an owl

Who lived in a wood,

The more he saw,

The less he spoke.

The less he spoke,

The more he heard.

Why can't we be

Like that wise old bird?

For some reason, this rhyme has stayed with me since childhood. Then a friend gave me a 10cm tall porcelain owl as a gift, which started off my collection of owls. I now have them in glass, metal, leather, paper, plastic, cane, wax, volcanic stone ... some bought during my travels, and others were gifts.

A part of the collection sits in a display case below the coffee table at home. Put together, you see all at once how different artists have rendered this one bird in their own way. No matter what they are made of, it's their eyes, always the eyes, that grab your attention first.

It was Rachael who first referred to the bird as my 'spirit animal', so the headline is from her. I was, naturally, drawn to the owls in my Harmony of Colour book, so here are two of them.

I kept to shades of brown for this owl, and let
 the colours rip with its dream-catcher.  

Once again, a study in browns. I really should
open my mind to other colors instead of keeping it so real.